Today is St. Patrick's Day but I was never allowed to celebrate it as a kid. My father was a strict Southern Baptist minister and he never extended graciousness to anything Catholic. When Michael Flanigan, an Irish Catholic kid who happened to be charming and the president of my high school student body, became my sweetheart, my father lowered the boom. "You can not even think of marrying a Catholic," he bellowed.
Of course I wasn't thinking of marrying Michael, but my anti-Catholic training as a young person also included discounting the concept of luck. I remember having a four-leaf clover and telling my father that I thought it might bring me luck. True to form he said, "There is no such thing as luck." To my father St. Patrick's Day, the Catholics and luck all went together and I was to keep them all at arm’s length. My father meant well but I now disagree with him on all three topics. I love and respect my Catholic friends, I am wearing green right now and I will surely have a beer today to celebrate the life of a great man. Then there's the concept of luck.
After listening to hundreds of business owners describe how they have turned ideas into millions of dollars I am a believer in luck. Over and over the amazing, hard-working, brilliant and delightful self-made millionaires I have met will concede that for all their plotting, planning and market research, their success includes a good measure of sheer luck. They look at others around them who have worked as hard and who are smart or smarter than they are but they just haven't hit as big. They know that even a tiny bit of luck along the way could have made a difference.
All my life I’ve heard that "Luck is preparation meeting opportunity,” but as these successful business owners attest, I am now convinced that luck - grace or mercy - play a part in how our business works or doesn't work. Here's just one of the many owners who told me that he was lucky. He said he was lucky to come from India to this country to study; he was lucky his parents matched him with a beautiful woman who became his wife; and, he was lucky to land the world's largest customer. Meet Shiv Krishnan the founder of Indus. He's one lucky guy.
To succeed in business you need to have the right product, the right people, the right processes and it's always good to put a four-leaf clover in your pocket.
